EXCLUSIVE Pearson buys certification group Credly in deal valued at $200m
https://www.reuters.com/business/exclusive-pearson-buys-certification-group-credly-deal-valued-200m-2022-01-31/
The UK-listed firm, a major supplier of courseware and assessments in schools and colleges in the United States, Britain and around the world
Pearson CEO Andy Bird told Reuters that verified credentials were becoming more important as technology adapts, leaving many companies with a skills gap where staff need training on how to work with processes such as artificial intelligence.
Pearson, which has been buffeted by the shift from physical courseware to online learning, bought AI and analytics group Faethm in 2021, which spots skills gaps for organisations.
Credly partners with organisations such as IBM, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services to provide certifications, or digital credentials, to workers both inside their firms and out who have attained a certain level with their product. Based in the United States, half of the people earning credentials on the platform are outside America, with India one of its biggest markets.
Pearson will now be able to combine the diagnostic tools of Faethm with its own digital learning programmes and Credly’s certification capabilities to offer a full service to companies.
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more on microcredentials in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=microcredential
more on Pearson in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=pearson
Laubersheimer, J., Ryan, D., & Champaign, J. (2016). InfoSkills2Go: Using Badges and Gamification to Teach Information Literacy Skills and Concepts to College-Bound High School Students. Journal of Library Administration, 56(8), 924.
https://www.academia.edu/21782837/InfoSkills2Go_Using_Badges_and_Gamification_to_Teach_Information_Literacy_Skills_and_Concepts_to_College_Bound_High_School_Students?email_work_card=title
From online trivia and virtual board games to complex first-person perspective video games and in-person scavenger hunts, libraries are creating games for a variety of purposes, including orientations and instruction (Broussard,2012; Mallon, 2013; Smith & Baker, 2011).
Although the line between gaming and gamification can be blurry, most scholars recognize differences. Games are interactive, involvechallenge, risk, and reward, and have rules and a goal (Pivec, Dziabenko, &Schinnerl, 2003; Becker, 2013). Gamification, on the other hand, utilizes spe-cific gaming elements, often interactivity and rewards, to make an ordinary task more engaging (Prince, 2013). The gamification layer is not the focus of an endeavor, but rather can add enjoyment and a sense of competition toa task.
Battista (2014) argues that well-executed badges could represent an authentic assessment tool, because they often require the student to tangibly demonstrate a skill, competency, or learning outcome.
Use of the badges helped the team organize the Web site and provided a hierarchy to follow once the steps for earning each badge were created.Each badge consists of three to six tasks. A task can be a tutorial, a video, a game, or a short reading assignment on a given topic. An assessment is given for each task
The fourth and final platform the group considered was BadgeOS fromLearningTimes. BadgeOS requires a WordPress installation BadgeOS was designed to work with Credly (https://credly.com/) and Mozilla Open Badges (http://openbadges.org/) as standard features.
LearnDash was the most useful plugin for the project beyond BadgeOS. Available for a reasonable fee, LearnDash adds tools and features that give WordPress the ability to be used as a complete learning management system(LMS).
Available for free under the GNU Public License, BuddyPress(https://buddypress.org/) is another plugin that was capable of integrating with BadgeOS as an extension. The advantage of BuddyPress for the project group was the addition of social media components and functionality to the project Web site.
Go-daddy.com offered comprehensive technical support, easy application instal-lation, and competitively priced hosting packages. A 3-year hosting agree-ment was purchased that included domain registration, unlimited storageand unlimited bandwidth.
compare to
practical application of D2L Brightspace badges for a chemistry course at SCSU
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2019/11/06/mastery-of-library-instruction-badge/
standard library instruction